Have you ever observed a lizard? People avoid looking at them because they’re filthy creatures. They’re considered to be cowardly. Try going after one and it will run away leaving behind a twitching tail instead of putting up a fight. They move on.
People say moving on is the natural order of things, how rivers flow to embrace the ocean, how time marches on without hurry or delay, how snakes shed their skins and slither away, they find examples everywhere to prove that moving on is a virtue, that it is the natural order of things – hence something we must do too.
But I refuse to move on.
Why should I move on when I know with utmost clarity that what lies ahead is garbage. Stinking, wet garbage. The kind whose stench rises up your nostrils in tangible fumes. And people expect me to walk straight up into that pile.
In the few years that I have lived, I’ve learned that it's best not to listen to people. They’re always saying all kinds of stupid things. Don’t cut your hair too short or no man will find you attractive. Don’t go out at night, men will think you’re available to be raped. Always smile no matter how angry you’re within. And hope to marry into a better family, caste is everything no matter what all these modern ideas tell you. You don’t need to be too smart, just smart enough to make conversation and then serve them home-cooked meals. If you want to survive youhave to bend according to the world, we don’t make the rules but it is what it is. Little adjustments go a long way with a side note that it is always you who has to make the ‘little’ adjustments, they’re so little you won’t even notice when you disappear behind roles and become one of those people – you know people who’re spewing such stupid things.
Once, I was them. Those people. I didn’t even realize when I had turned stupid. The change was slow but after joining them, I felt like I had come home. I received more support from the stupid community than I had ever received from my family. Honestly, it was amazing. I felt as if I had tapped into these universal truths and if I didn’t start sharing them with everyone immediately, humanity would suffer.
I was married off at 23. It was a task to be done and dusted. Hush, finally, a relief. Arranged marriage. He was a man. A manly man. He was the happiest with my transformation from sane to stupid. It made his life easier because suddenly we agreed on everything. Once I was running the household, I realized that this was the real life. The life everyone lived and talked about. Waking up to make his tea, running around to make his breakfast, giving him his forgotten wallet at the doorway, and getting back to household chores. I hated household chores but since I didn’t go out and make money, it was my duty to keep our (his) house clean and shining. I was given the privilege of sitting at home all day and doing nothing. In all respects, I was supposed to be happy. And after I had joined the forces of stupid people, who could dare stop me from being the ideal and revered housewife. Oops, sorry, we’re called homemakers now.
But then one day, everything changed. The way I had changed from being a sane person — whobelieved she could do as she wished with her life, who didn’t put her nose in other people’sbusiness, who respected all but didn’t put anyone on a pedestal — to a stupid one.
He died. The person who was supposed to look after me all my life passed away and people came flocking to our doors. I was sad. But I was not inconsolable. One by one, people left, leaving me with pitiful faces and kernels of advice & warnings. Being a widow is hard, and the world will be harsh to you, you thought being a woman is difficult, ha ha, try being a widow, you’re lucky they don’t treat widows nowadays like they used to in the olden days, and more. But once everyone was gone and I was alone in the house, it felt as if I could finally step awayfrom a blinding spotlight on a grand stage. I moved on swingingly.
Two months after he died, I left. I had to get away. The fog of stupidity was slowly lifting and I wanted to leave before it descended on me again.
Where did I go? I went to a faraway place. I took an auto. Then a bus. Finally, a long long long train ride. It was an overwhelming journey for the senses with smells of pickles, different tiffin boxes, sweat, damp earth, damper armpits, silent farts, loud farts, jasmine oil, fresh fields, sandalwood talcum powder, and other unidentifiable scents all merged into one train smell. People were going out and coming in at all times. Children were crying, hawkers were sellingknicks and knacks, and food vendors were repeating their oily offerings in shrill tones, while the train thundered on metallic rails.
I got down at a station that stood in front of greenish-blue hills. The only reason I got down there was because I heard the distinctive meows of a peacock. My grandma used to say that peacocks only ever resided in happy places.
A family was waiting for a train at the station. A small baby with rosy cheeks and bright eyes. Amother. A father. The baby was glowing. I smiled without wanting to. I wished it wasn’t a girl because I knew the world, starting with her own family, would manage to extinguish that glint in her eyes.
I wondered if I had left a baby back home.
I ambled down strange roads. I ate something in an old restaurant. It tasted more like paper than food. A few days passed and I realized I was living there.
I lived quietly for three years. I bothered no one, no one bothered me. In all earnestness, this felt like my real life. Loneliness stung me from time to time but its sting was sweeter than the complicated web of relationships and expectations. I was glad that no one had come looking for me and if they had, they had never found me. I had camouflaged like a surreptitious lizard on a beige wall.
I thought about my dead husband occasionally. I remembered how I used to talk him up to myfriends. All of us did that. It was like we were all writing oral essays on Why My Husband Was Not Like Other Husbands. Reasons included: he picked up his plate after meals, he dried his own towel after a bath, once in a blue moon he got groceries, that one time he bought me a super expensive necklace after threatening to hit me, he didn’t force sex unless he was drunk, and more.
Let me be clear. He was like the other husbands. We were all just scared to say it. Because if we stopped believing our lies and giving standing ovations to their bare minimum efforts, our lives would be pathetic. No silver linings, just drudgery.
Here, I lived alone. I read. I listened to the songs I loved. I cooked, I ate, and I served no one. I worked too. I listened to the peacocks meow and on days that I was lucky, I saw their glistening blue necks peeking from branches. It wasn’t happiness but it was peace.
Then my doorbell rang and my life changed for a fourth time.
First, I was sane. Second, I was married and stupid. Third, I was alone, sane, and at peace. Every time I thought this, finally, was my real life.
But the fourth one was final and real because I won’t be moving on. There will be no more lives.
On the other side of the door stood a young woman. She had just moved into the apartment next to mine and was inviting me over for a coffee. She was tall and pleasant. Straight hair, crooked nose, and gleaming eyes. She was wearing peacock feather earrings. She looked like a woman who had splendidly survived the world and stupid people. I said yes.
She gave me her name. I gave her mine. She gave me a cup of coffee, and I gave her my heart. She spoke clearly and kindly. What struck me about her was how unafraid she was. She lived alone but unlike me, she thrived. Over days and months, we became closer. We started eating our meals together, sharing our daily activities, and I felt like I could tell her anything. She had surrounded herself with sane people and I quickly became a part of that circle. We met occasionally and it was always fulfilling. I felt like I had suddenly stepped into a world of colour from my previous black-and-white film of a life.
She was hilarious. All our conversations were peppered with little jokes. The time I spent with her made me feel like a tuft of cloud, light and floating. I told her about him. While telling her things, my past became clearer. I remembered many things about my life that I had forgotten. I remembered that I had actually loved to cook, but had come to despise it because no matter what I made, it did not please him. She gobbled everything down with relish and I found myself buying recipe books to try newer things. I remembered how his anger scared me. Hewas capable of doing anything and though he had never hit me, he had come very close to it onseveral occasions. I remembered we never had a baby. I remembered how I had killed him.
I told her everything. We were sitting on my couch, our legs splayed on the table, smoking cigarettes. She flicked her cigarette in the ash tray and said something I would never forget—that by killing him I had killed a cockroach and we never mourn for cockroaches.
I had never planned on killing him but it definitely was no act of self-defence either. He was calm as a cucumber, going about his day. But something set him off. He had come into the dining room, bathed, dressed, and perfumed and started screaming all of a sudden, “Can’t you make some effort around the house? It feels like we’re living in a pigsty. This is literally your only job,” after looking at my purse which was on the dining table instead of hidden away in my wardrobe.
In a way, it was an act of self-preservation.
It was in his nature to give me commands, to criticise my work, my food, my appearance, my intelligence (or lack thereof), my family, my upbringing, my everything. His screaming was not out of the ordinary but that morning, I just wanted him to stop speaking his filthy words, forever. He had started screaming when I had just added a spoon of sugar to his thankless tea.
Without thinking, I picked up a beige lizard that was sunning on the window and I dropped it in the boiling tea. I watched as it shuddered in the scorching brown liquid and lay lifeless after some time. The limp lizard coiled itself in the strainer as the tea dripped into the white porcelain cup. I calmly gave it to him. He slurped it down while reading a shitty newspaper and left for office. On the way, somewhere on a rather busy street, he dropped dead. The only thing I felt bad for that morning was the innocent lizard who couldn’t move on in time.From my childhood, I was fascinated by lizards. I could pick them up as if they were dry leaves. They have near-transparent undersides, minuscule talons, and beautiful black eyes. They drop their tails as a defence mechanism and long after the lizard is gone, you can see its tail writhing without the body. Many a lizard had forsaken their tails after I had picked them up. I loved examining them and leaving them outdoors before someone decided to kill them. Usually, they’re considered to be disgusting little reptiles who bring you bad/good luck depending onwhere and how you see them. Bad luck if they fall on your head, good luck if they fall in your husband’s tea, you know that sort of a thing?
Nothing changed between us after this little story came out. She was her funny, kind self. I wasmy own self. Along with my books, music, cooking, and peace, I had found true companionship and happiness. This seemed like my real life. Remember those stupid people? One thing they used to say was not so stupid after all: we all need a companion in life. But they used it as a justification to marry you off to any lousy person, which was stupid.
Over the past 3 years, some stupid people have again penetrated my life, and lo and behold, they want to get me married and move on from this widow’s life. For a woman, to live without a husband, is the greatest tragedy that they can conjure. My hairdresser knows the perfect guy for me who won’t mind my age. A colleague I work with has a distant relative who is a widower, won’t we just be perfect for each other? And so on.
Like I said, I refuse to move on. I have found my life, at the fourth try and I wouldn’t give it up for anything. Least of all, marriage. I liked to think that I had 4 separate lives, each demarcated perfectly with straight lines and boundaries. But I have come to realize that I am living all lives together. Their colours start flowing over the lines and mixing together. You can never truly live only one life. You’re living it all at the same time, with the good and the bad, with peace and chaos, with men and women, with stupid people and sane ones, with lizards and peacocks.
Aditi Chikhale is a clinical psychology graduate who pursued a creative career after completing her education. Currently based in Goa, she works as a copywriter and believes that building a better world starts from ourselves.